I got some spam today that was fascinating in how targeted it was. The subject line was "Running a Befunge-93 program on a multi-core processor". Befunge-93 is what is known as an "esoteric programming language". Look up the definition of esoteric, and you'll see that it's flattering to have someone use the term assuming you know what it means. I had no idea who the author of the e-mail is, but if they knew Befunge, and they knew that I knew Befunge, then they must know a little about me, and given that they know a little about me, then the body of the e-mail would probably interest me, right?

It was advertisement for viagra, which (I fear I have to state this explicitly), I'm not particularly interested in. But how would a spammer get the idea to mention Befunge in the subject line? They couldn't have simply been mailing this subject line to everybody. The topic is simply too obscure to be worthwhile. Statistically speaking, you are much more likely to alienate people than pique their interest.

I suspect what has happened was that the spammer was lurking on the newsgroup I post in. If I had to take a guess, it'd be the "comp.programming" newsgroup. The human spammer themselves probably never actually read the post; rather they were running a program which randomly selects (perhaps 1 or 2 year old) subject lines from the newsgroup, and then sends an e-mail out to everybody who participates in that newsgroup with that subject line. That is to say, probably someone started a thread called "Running a Befunge-93 program on a multi-core processor" in the newsgroup a couple years ago, and the spamming programming randomly selected this thread, without understanding what the subject meant. Statistically, most people who participated in that thread would be interested in the topic (the participants are self-selecting). Also statistically, anyone who happened to have ever participated in the newsgroup, whether in that particular thread or not, would probably also be interested in the topic.

They say that these days, computing power is very cheap for a spammer. That is, a spammer can easily afford to employ millions of computers to accomplish whatever spamming strategy, whereas it may be too expensive to employ a mere 20 humans. In the old days (1980s-1990s), viruses would make your computer unbootable, or would delete all your files. It was primarily vandalism. These days, viruses secretly take over your computer to act as a node within a giant network of super computers whose sole task is sending out spam. It's now become organized crime. These viruses "live" longer if they don't produce any noticeable effect on your computer. If you don't notice anything wrong, you won't try to have your computer fixed. It's a form of digital natural selection.

Given the immense computing power available to spammers, I foresee that they will eventually lurk not only newsgroups, but blogs and social networking sites. Recall again that computing power is cheap for spammers, but human power is expensive. Any strategy a spammer employs has to be able to be carried out by a computer, which means that it cannot rely on common sense, artificial intelligence, or even an understanding of the human language.

What a spam-program could do is go through my blog, and look at all the sites I link to. It might, for example, randomly chose this entry on my blog, and find this link within that blog post. It follows the link, and randomly selects a sentence in that link, e.g. "Yes, Rudy is smarter than Bush", and use that as the subject of a spam e-mail directed towards me. Or even better yet, instead of searching for sites that my blog links to, the spam-program could search for sites that link to my blog. You can use the simple google query "link:nebupookins.net" to find a list of all sites which link to my blog, and then use the content found there as subject lines for my spam. You could, in fact, probably copy the page verbatim, as it would then appear to be just like an e-mail commenting on my post. Alternatively, the spam-program could do a google query for "related:nebupookins.net/" and find pages which are "similar" to my blog and plagiarise from there.

There are so many strategies like these that I think would be much more effective at defeating spam filters than putting random punctuation or character substitution, e.g. "P.E.N.1.5".

Chatterbot technology is becoming more and more sophisticated that it'd be reasonable for someone to be unable to distinguish between a chatterbot and a ditzy airhead (you can follow that previous link and try chatting with some chatterbots online yourself to see how convincing they can sometimes be). It's not inconceivable to imagine spammers employing chatterbots to write e-mails in an attempt to have conversations with you, gain your trust, and then "recommend" certain products to you. This would parallel the advertisement industry in television, where there's less and less emphasis on explicit advertisiment (e.g. commercials, to which the e-mail analogue is spam) and more emphasis on product placement (to which the e-mail analogue is a "fake" friend as described above).

I was actually planning on writing a story with the above premise, but I'm quite lazy, so I haven't even started the first chapter. In the story, the narrator is a telemarketer which corresponds primarily via e-mail rather than telephone. The first spoiler is that he's actually an spambot, not a human. He pushes products towards a girl, and gradually starts getting "feelings" for her. The second spoiler is that the girl too is a spam bot, and she was trying to push products onto him. When the guy and the girl discovers this, this leads to them investigating stuff which leads to the third spoiler: that the entire Internet, everyone they spoke to, are spam bots. The entire Internet has been abandonned by humans due to the rising ratio of spams. They moved on to something else, but there are still abandonned machines, running spam programs, and the spam programs never found out that there are no humans left, and they kept spamming each other. I think it'd make a good story, but again, I'm too lazy to actually write it all out.